"embedded systems" entries

Toyota’s Spaghetti Code — Toyota had more than 10,000 global variables. And he was critical of Toyota watchdog supervisor — software to detect the death of a task — design. He testified that Toyota’s watchdog supervisor ‘is incapable of ever detecting the death of a major task. That’s its whole job. It doesn’t do it. It’s not designed to do it.’ (via @qrush)

IoT Struggle, Embedded Tools, Download Accelerator, and Comms Smog

The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things — a Bruce Sterling Kindle single, a powerfully-written challenge to the presumed-benevolent technology-pervaded universe that we label “the Internet of Things”. The Internet of Things is not about a talking refrigerator, because that is the old-fashioned consumer retail world of electrical white goods. It’s an archaic concept, like software bought in a plastic-wrapped box from a shelf. The genuine Internet of Things wants to invade that refrigerator, measure it, instrument it, monitor any interactions with it; it would cheerfully give away a fridge at cost.

mbeddr — a set of integrated and extensible languages for embedded software engineering, plus an IDE. It supports implementation, testing, verification and process aspects. It integrates with command-line build tools and integration servers, as well as file-based version control systems. Nice to see something beyond webdev getting tools love.

Replace wget With axel — download accelerator, aka a parallel wget for situations where the fetched file has multiple servers.

Practically dead in smartphones, BlackBerry is dominant in the auto industry.

“BlackBerry’s QNX operating system, used to power its BlackBerry 10 phones, has become the technology of choice for mapping, communication and entertainment systems in cars from Ford Motor Co. to luxury German brands Porsche and BMW.”

BlackBerry acquired QNX in 2010 from Harman International, a long-time supplier to the auto industry. “Long-time supplier” is the crucial bit. As for why QNX has done well, Bloomberg explains:

“‘QNX is the standard right now,’ said Matthew Stover, an analyst at Guggenheim Partners in Boston. ‘It’s proven and people know what it is.’

A key to maintaining the lead is QNX’s track record in running safety systems, crucial in situations where a software freeze could mean a car accident.”

By the logic of Silicon Valley, that’s a disruption waiting to happen, as Google and a consortium of automakers have foreseen. But this also underscores the ways in which the market for software in heavy industry, and in physical machines in general, is different from the market for software that stays strictly virtual.

IoTFest reveals exemplary applications as well as challenges

Last Saturday’s IoT Festival at MIT became a meeting ground for people connecting the physical world. Embedded systems developers, security experts, data scientists, and artists all joined in this event. Although it was called a festival, it had a typical conference format with speakers, slides, and question periods. Hallway discussions were intense.

However you define the Internet of Things (O’Reilly has its own take on it, in our Solid blog site and conference), a lot stands in the way of its promise. And these hurdles are more social than technical.

MIT's IoTFest reveals the IoT poses as much challenge as it does promise.

Last Saturday’s IoT Festival at MIT became a meeting-ground for people connecting the physical world. Embedded systems developers, security experts, data scientists, and artists all joined in this event. Although it was called a festival, it had a typical conference format with speakers, slides, and question periods. Hallway discussions were intense.

However you define the Internet of Things (O’Reilly has its own take on it, in our Solid blog site and conference), a lot stands in the way of its promise. And these hurdles are more social than technical.

Participants eye O’Reilly books (Credit: IoT Festival)

Some of the social discussion we have to have before we get the Internet of Things rolling are:

What effects will all this data collection, and the injection of intelligence into devices, have on privacy and personal autonomy? And how much of these precious values are we willing to risk to reap the IoT’s potential for improving life, saving resources, and lowering costs?

One of the reasons I liked the metaphor of oobleck for the melding of hardware and software is that it can rapidly change on you when you’re not looking. It pours like a liquid, but it can “snap” like a solid. If you place the material under stress, as might happen if you set it on a speaker cone, it changes state and acts much more like a weird solid.

This “phase change” effect may also occur as we connect highly specialized embedded computers (really, “sensors”) to the Internet. As Bruce Schneier recently observed, patching embedded systems is hard. As if on cue, a security software company published a report that thousands of TVs and refrigerators may have been compromised to send spam. Embedded systems are easy to overlook from a security perspective because at the dawn of the Internet, security was relatively easy: install a firewall to sit between your network and the Internet, and carefully monitor all connections in and out of the network. Security was spliced into the protocol stack at the network layer. One of my earliest projects in understanding the network layer was working with early versions of Linux to configure a firewall with the then-new technology of address translation. As a result, my early career took place in and around network firewalls. Read more…

Featured Video

The Internet of Things That Do What You Tell Them: Cory Doctorow passionately explains how computers are already entwined in our lives, which means laws that support lock-in are much more than inconveniences.